HE
OLD-TIME/NORTH-WOODS/TIMBER-CRUISER'S tea ceremony was "almost as complicated
as the Japanese version," says forestry-professor/ski-coach/legend in-his-own-time
Bill MacConnell `43, who experienced the phenomenon firsthand in the Maine
woods right out of graduate school.

The ritual involved waist-deep snow; wet,
dead wood ("Birch or spruce; couldn't be fir"); a "toy boiler"
that came out of somebody's pack, along with the frozen sandwiches; and
a pervasive flavor of mitten. "Had to be just perfect for those old-timers,"
says MacConnell, recalling those 30-below-zero days. "Quite a change
from college life," he adds.

Some people, certainly, were questing
for perfection on campus, too, so mode of living was the major change between
MacConnell's days at Massachusetts State College, and later Yale, and his
interludes as a timber-cruiser. (MacConnell is colorful, too, on the subject
of how much food it took to keep timber-cruisers people who inventory forests
for their logging potential fueled in January: "You'd start out with
oats, like horses. You'd get a pie-plate full of oatmeal, then a refill
with bacon and eggs, then another with beans. And donuts `til you got sick.")
But MacConnell is such a three-dimensional man that, listening to him,
you feel how completely the details of brush, stand, creek, slope, and
slog the details of woods and mountains are woven into his academic identity.

Both things are there in his physical
presence: burl-tough body; tweed jacket; squarish Spencer Tracy face; engaging
gap, when he grins, between his two front teeth. There's also a curious
burr in his speech a funny little doub- ling of "o" sounds, as
in "co-orse of study" or "coaching a spo-art." MacConnell
allows that this could derive from his Scots-Canadian roots, since his
family moved from New Brunswick to Westboro when he was five, though, "How
that would stick with a person, I'm not sure."

He's the son of a carpenter. He was one
of nine children. His pre-war days at MSC, where he arrived in 1937, sound
rather elegant: when he won a scholarship "for immigrants from large
families," he joined a fraternity and bought two suits, one of them
with tails. Academically he strove, as did his classmates, he says, for
a "solid gentleman's C." (It was quite a comeuppance when, as
a young instructor at the young UMass, "I faced these veterans thirty-three
men in a class and every one was going to get an A no matter what it took.")

MacConnell was a veteran himself ("No
heroics," he says of his three years as a cartographer in the European
theater) and a typical self-made product of UMass. Having put himself through
high school and college working in apple orchards, he went to Yale on the
G.I. Bill for his master's in forestry. Offered a teaching job at UMass
in 1948, he decided to try it for a year to please his wife, Shirley `39,
who was pretty tired of having him in New Haven all the time: "Every
time I came home she acted like the circus had come to town," he says.

The year of teaching turned out to be
fifty. And while he's long since considered college teaching "the
best job in the world," it's never been the only thing he's done.
He insisted on timber-cruising for another ten summers; "I didn't
feel I could be a professor without field experience," he told an
interviewer a few years back. In subsequent years he worked up sweat equity
in a patchwork of odd lots of tax-delinquent forest land in New Hampshire.
When the land was sold twenty years ago, it dumped into his lap a hundred
thousand dollars "that I had no intention of allowing to wrecky my
life," and which, consequently, he stashed away in investments. From
the growth of those investments he's given a total of $400,000 to support
a professorship in forestry at UMass possibly even endow a chair, if the
fund grows enough. ("People told me my kids would be furious with
me," he says. "They're not they're proud!" The kids are
Shirley, Peter, and Heather `74.)

And halfway through his career, on the
basis of no prior experience with the sport, MacConnell developed a whole
new persona as a ski coach.

Because his son wanted to learn to ski;
becauseShirleywanted to get back to it, too, having skied
in college; because "Scotsman that I am," he found the bargain
of a season pass irresistible and was soon "dragging the family out
to ski even when it was raining"; and, finally, because after MacConnell
spent a few years coaching his own kids and acting as occasional driver
for the UMass ski team, the then-coach of that team was injured and "Mac"
stepped into the role he's now held since 1961. (Since 1975 he's coached
the women's team as well. "I didn't know how to do that, so I just
treat them exactly like the men," he says.)

The coaching side of MacConnell is a whole
other set of stories, and, not surprisingly, those also involve much brush-cutting
and bonhomie. (Plus eighteen men's and twelve women's Eastern College Ski
Conference titles on, to put it mildly, a shoestring.) MacConnell himself
makes no apparent divisions among his many modes. He relishes a pair of
director's chairs, one labeled "PROF," the other labeled "COACH,"
in his Holdsworth office.

His academic side is represented not only
by the usual wall of books behind those chairs, but across the hall in
another of his domains of many decades: the photogrammetry lab, which he
set up in 1952 in response to the need for resource information in visual
form.
In "the shop," as MacConnell calls it, a roomful of equipment
and assistants Janice Stone `76G and David Goodwin `94G produce, under
his supervision, fabulous digital images of watersheds, habitats, and whole
states. It's as glossy an operation as you can imagine being run by Bill
MacConnell. Showing a visitor around, though, he uses several times the
interesting phrase "ground truth" by which he means the comprehension,
corroboration, and correction you can't get from aerial photographs, let
alone satellite imagery.

"THERE'S NOT ONE OF THEM ALIKE,"
says Dean Robert Helgesen of the projects for which the College of Food
and Natural Resources is fund-raising during Campaign UMass. "But
the common thread is that all these projects emphasize scholarly activity
in the college. They all assist the faculty or the students in ways that
our alumni and friends agree are of substantial value."